universities – Toril Moi

University of Oslo Strategic Advisory Report Published

September 28, 2014 No Comments

In August, Build a Ladder to the Stars, a report on the strategic plan of the University of Oslo was published. I was privileged to be a member of theÂ Â stellar committee who wrote it, the so-calledÂ Strategic Advisory Board (SAB). The SABÂ was chaired by Esko Aho, former prime minister of Finland; the other members were Peter Agre (Johns Hopkins, 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry); Shaheen Sardar Ali (Warwick; Law/UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention; Erwin Neher (GÃ¶ttingen, 1991 Nobel Prize in Medicine); Frans van Vught (Rector Emeritus of the University of Twente, High level EU education advisor). For an overview of the reception of the report, in English, see this article by Jan Petter Myklebust in University World News.

Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies, and Professor of English, and Theater Studies at Duke University. She is Director of the Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature at Duke.

In spring 2009, she was a Fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.

Toril Moi grew up in the countryside in the south-west of Norway, and was educated at the University of Bergen. From 1979 to 1989 she lived mostly in Oxford, UK, and since 1989 she has been a resident of North Carolina.

As an academic, she writes on feminism, literary theory, ordinary language philosophy and literature. Her first book, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985) has been translated into fifteen languages. Her 1994 book Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman has been translated into five languages, and a new 2nd edition was published in 2008. Her book Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism won the MLA's award for best book in comparative literary studies for 2007. Her most recent book on feminist theory is Sex, Gender and the Body: The Student Edition of What Is a Woman (2005).

In Norway, Toril Moi also writes widely for newspapers and magazines.